Reilly went on for hours, finally wrapping up simply by saying, “I believe this man is innocent.”
With that, Wilentz would offer the closing summation for the state, a three-hour wrap-up that included a vigorous defense of all Reilly had attacked, including Koehler. He dared anyone to “find a blemish on the reputation” of the Madison scientist.
“Arthur Koehler,” Wilentz said, “who has spent his life on this sort of thing, must have been ambitious for advancement. The man who one and a half years before Hauptmann was arrested traced the lumber to a Bronx lumber yard.
“What is there in life for Koehler? He’s at the top of the heap in government service. But he’s got to be assassinated in this scheme to free Hauptmann.”
Koehler thought he was masterful. “Just imagine him at his best,” he wrote Ethelyn. “Not too emotional, but sincere enough to strike the table with his fist once in a while.”
No sooner had Wilentz completed his closing summary when a New Jersey pastor, Reverend Vincent Godfrey Burns, cried out, “A man confessed this crime to me in my church.” He was immediately hustled out of the courtroom. That night, the picture of the New Jersey State troopers pulling him was on the front pages of newspapers around the country.
Burns had told both Reilly and Wilentz in the past that a man who came to his church on Palm Sunday, March 20, 1932, told him he had kidnapped and murdered Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. Both Reilly and Wilentz had thought him mad. Trenchard ordered the jury to ignore what they had just heard.
“By a strange series of coincidences it seems that I was fated to play some part in the Lindbergh kidnapping case,” Burns later wrote.
After all, he had studied under the minister who married the Lindberghs, gone to school with Bronx District Attorney Tom Foley, and served in a church built by John Condon’s son-in-law. Coincidentally, Burns also had a direct connection with Koehler. His “dear friend” John Brown Cuno, who had served as the best man at Burns’s wedding, worked with Koehler in the initial part of the investigation.
At 11:21 am on Wednesday, February 13, after forty-two days of hearing testimony and being secluded from their family and friends, the jurors returned to their room to deliberate. They would vote five separate times to decide Hauptmann’s fate.
“Bitter argument, tears, semi-hysteria and exhaustion following in rapid succession,” reported the International News.
While the world waited, the courtroom was transformed into a waiting room, as newspaper writers, lawyers, and spectators were “talking, laughing, reading newspapers, eating sandwiches, drinking coffee. The floor was littered with piles of newspaper and torn pieces of paper,” reported the Associated Press. “The air was full of smoke. The place was hot, stuffy, growing unbearable.
“The apathy was suddenly disrupted by the sheriff.”
Since it had been built, the Hunterdon County Courthouse had rung a bell to announce to its community that a verdict had been reached. Held in an octagonal, gold-leafed cupola, the bell was located toward the front of the roof just behind the portico. Designed to call local politicians back to their meetings after lunch, it also rang when justice was ready to be dispensed.
On the night of February 13, Undersheriff A. K. “Barry” Barrowcliff was in charge of ringing that bell when the jury had reached a verdict.
“Barry,” the sheriff shouted in the courtroom, startling those in attendance. “Barry!”
“Spectators jumped to their feet,” the AP continued, “their eyes following the chubby little man as he pushed his way excitedly through the jam in the aisle.”
Wilentz arrived, as did Schwarzkopf and Lamb. They closed the doors. Reilly stood at attention. The room was quiet.
And then, at 10:25 pm, they heard the bell. The whole town heard it. Damon Runyon wrote that it “sounds like a church bell tolling a funeral service. The sound carried far out over the Jersey uplands.” Anna Hauptmann was listening for that sound at the Flemington home she was staying at before rushing back to her husband’s side.
A rush went through a crowd, estimated at more than seven thousand people who’d gathered for the verdict. “A mob,” Runyon called it that “begins yelling. The faces of the men and women milling before the colonial pillars of the ancient building appear ghastly in the brilliant glare of the flares” set up for the photographers in attendance.
Eleven hours, thirteen minutes, and five ballots later, the jury returned to the courtroom at 10:34 pm. They were grave faced.
“Let the defendant stand,” Trenchard said.
“Members of the jury, have you agreed upon your verdict?” asked the court clerk.
“We have,” they said collectively before Charles Walton, their foreman, spoke for them.
“Mr. Foreman, what say you? Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?”
“Guilty,” Walton said, stammering and shaking. “We find the defendant, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, guilty of murder in the first degree.”
Reilly insisted they be polled individually. Each one asked for their verdict. Each one responded, “Guilty of murder in the first degree.”
“There is nothing left for me,” Anna Hauptmann cried out.
Trenchard moved to sentence Hauptmann immediately.
“Bruno Richard Hauptmann, you have been convicted of murder in the first degree,” he said. “The sentence of the court is that you, the said Bruno Richard Hauptmann, suffer death at the time and place and in the manner provided by law.”
That manner would be the electric chair. He set an execution date for some time during the week of March 18, just four weeks later.
Reporters swarmed when court adjourned. Everyone associated with the case was asked their thoughts.
Koehler simply said, “I’ve been working on this case for two years. I am glad it is over. I wish it had not been necessary.”
The jurors would be offered vaudeville opportunities to share their stories on stages around the country for significant amounts of money. They chose instead to share their thoughts with specific reporters and media outlets. Many of them said it was Arthur Koehler who sealed the prosecution’s case.
“The most brilliant performances in the witness chair should be credited to the handwriting experts and the wood specialist,” said Walton to the Los Angeles Times for an article featuring all of the jurors on “How Hauptmann Was Convicted.” “Their testimony was a treat to the jury.”
Juror number 12, Howard Biggs, who had sat next to Liscom Case and listened to his thoughts on the wood evidence throughout, said, “The testimony and evidence conclusively damning of Hauptmann—probably the deciding factor in the verdict we are to give—were the testimony and evidence presented by Koehler, the wood expert.”
The media covering the trial knew Case would compliment Koehler. His body language showed it throughout the trial. Indeed, Case explained what he had told his fellow jurors during their deliberation.
“Arthur Koehler showed a wonderful knowledge of trees and wood,” Case said. “He knew a stick of wood when he saw one and, more than two years before Hauptmann was even suspected, he traced that ladder to the Bronx.
The ladder was made of a variety of woods. Through forests, lumber camps, sawmills and freight yards, Mr. Koehler followed those sticks. . . .
I looked at all these exhibits with a lot of interest. It was in my line. In contrast with Koehler and his clear story, there was a defense witness named DeBisschop whose testimony might have befuddled us. He brought in a number of samples of wood he said were thirty years older than the ladder rail. They looked as though they had all been cut from the same stock. What Mr. DeBisschop was trying to prove was that all lumber looks alike. But Mr. Koehler’s reasoning had given us a different impression. . . .
My summing up will be simple. Hauptmann was in court because he was caught with a lot of the ransom money. The handwriting evidence, pres
ented by men we could see were honest and sincere, left us no doubt as to his connection with the ransom notes.
Then came the wood story. Wood in a Bronx lumber yard got into the ladder found at Col. Lindbergh’s home in Hopewell. Hauptmann had worked in that lumber yard. Hauptmann had bought wood from that lumber yard. Pieces of it turned up in the ladder. Wood in the ladder proved to have come from the attic of the house in which Hauptmann lived.
Can you blame us twelve jurors for our verdict?
In the not-too-distant future, the governor of New Jersey would do just that.
12
In the weeks and months after Bruno Hauptmann’s conviction, praise for Arthur Koehler flowed in from all over America.
Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace prepared a memo for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt alerting him about Koehler’s “many months of resourceful work” that led to Hauptmann’s conviction. Colonel Breckinridge, Lindbergh’s personal attorney, wrote to Koehler, “With the successful termination of the Hauptmann trial there stands out in bold relief the dramatic consequences of your splendid work. I think you have written one of the most interesting chapters in the history of jurisprudence.”
Attorney General Wilentz sent Forest Products Lab director Carlisle Winslow a letter calling Koehler “a delightful man, able and willing to work at all hours” and calling his testimony “one of the main factors that contributed to the victory for the State.”
But what moved Koehler even more were the comments from his professional peers and from average Americans whose knowledge of wood and trees, he hoped, was greater as a result of his testimony and public discussion about it. Axel H. Oxholm, who ran the Forest Products Division at the Department of Commerce, congratulated him on the “splendid publicity which you secured for the Forest Products Laboratory, or perhaps I should say for the cause of forestry? Everyone interested in the Lindbergh case has also been given a course in wood technology by reading your testimony and this has been of inestimable value in creating an interest in forestry research.”
H. S. Betts with the US Forest Service, who had examined the ladder just a couple of months after the kidnapping, sent Koehler a note telling him that “the average American knows more about wood than he has for some time,” courtesy of his work.
H. P. Brown, a professor of wood technology at the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, said it “was a splendid task to bring home to the public a knowledge of what wood technology really is.”
Professor E. Fritz at the University of California–Berkeley College of Agriculture told Koehler he thought his work tracking Rails 12 and 13 was his “greatest piece of detective work” and added jokingly that, as Koehler’s fame spread, “the rest of us poor wood technologists must be content to bask in your reflected light.”
Samuel Record, a professor at the Yale University School of Forestry, said Koehler’s research and testimony were “a masterpiece. I know of no one else with the requisite combination of training, experience, skill and determination. You certainly were the right man for the job. From now on no attorney can claim that ‘There ain’t no such animal as a wood expert.’
“We have got to bring that realization home to other folks. . . . The methods to be employed are those you have used with such telling force—a grasp of the problem, a realization of its possibilities and indefatigable following through.”
If the correspondence coming into Koehler’s office at the lab was any indication, “other folks” were indeed making that realization.
From Koehler’s home state of Wisconsin came a letter from Alice Carroll, who explained, “There had always been a doubt in my mind as to just how guilty Hauptmann was, but after hearing your testimony I am fully convinced that he got all that was coming to him.”
“One reads occasionally of an individual citizen rising to shoulder a great burden with ease and honor and dignity. So it is with you,” wrote Henry J. Schwenk, who worked for the power company in St. Louis. “I write as one of the countless thousands of Americans who appreciate your effort in our behalf.”
A Saturday Evening Post article called “Who Made That Ladder?” and featuring an interview with Koehler was read by more than three million Americans, leading to even more plaudits coming his way. The lengthy article, running over seven pages in the magazine, allowed him to wax poetic about his work and his passion for the outdoors as he described his efforts tracking Rails 12 and 13 in the Hauptmann case:
I love the forests, and so I often think of those Americans who came first beyond the seaboard and kept alive by reading the all-important signs of deer or bear or hostile Indians, printed ever so faintly on the soft floor of the wilderness. But just the same, and with, indeed, precisely the same instincts, some among us who have come long after them must learn to read and understand the machines from which we eke a living, make shelters and defend ourselves.
If Koehler in court was more academic in his tone, the Koehler in the popular magazine was far more rhetorical. “I felt sure,” he said, “that the ladder’s maker who thought himself so rich in cunning did not know [that] I kept on working, day by day and often late at night. . . . Looking backward now, I do not see just how I mustered patience for the job that lay ahead. How to chart a pinwheel’s flaming circles would seem, at first, as simple as the thing I had to do. . . .
“Remember, I never hunted Hauptmann. The fellow that I sought was just a man who made a ladder.”
The article “was better reading than the best fictional detective story,” wrote the manager of the Cleveland, Ohio, Lumber Institute.
“I believe [your work] more than any other evidence convicted Hauptmann,” wrote W. O. Appelquist from Libby, Montana. And B. A. Porter from Memphis wrote, “Had I been on the Hauptmann jury and the State had rested on your testimony alone, my verdict would have been guilty.”
The story “aroused a great deal of interest and comment even in this rather remote district,” wrote T. C. Emberg from Manitoba, Canada. Other letters came in from Edinburgh, Scotland, and from a chemistry professor in Amsterdam.
However, there remained critics of Koehler and skeptics of Hauptmann’s guilt.
One man from Milwaukee who signed his letter as a “Free Mason!!” said the idea that Hauptmann built the ladder was “a dam stupid lie! The German carpenter is innocent, but you got the $10,000” —responding, no doubt, to reports after the verdict that the wood investigation had cost $10,000. In fact, other expert witnesses were paid, but Koehler was not; he received nothing more than his government salary during the entire investigation. He wrote in pen at the bottom of this letter, “I did not!” and signed it with his initials, placing it in a file at the lab.
A. G. Kent from Tampa wrote, “There was another carpenter (a Nazarene) almost two thousand years ago, who was tried and framed and (altho innocent) the people cried out all the more—‘Crucify him, crucify him. . . . ’ We feel sure that he was framed.”
The most prominent critic of Koehler, however, would be New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman. As Hauptmann’s appeals continued to be denied at all levels throughout 1935, including by the US Supreme Court, Hoffman’s belief that Hauptmann had had an accomplice grew.
Born in South Amboy, New Jersey, Harold Hoffman was writing a weekly newspaper column on fishing at the age of twelve. After high school, he became a police reporter and later sports editor of the Perth Amboy Evening News across the Raritan River from where he grew up.
He enlisted in the army during World War I as a private, gaining numerous promotions for his fighting north of Verdun in France. He would leave the service as a captain of infantry and return to his hometown for a career in banking before getting into politics. He was elected city treasurer, then mayor at age twenty-nine, and a year later he embarked on a campaign for Congress. After two successive terms there he returned to New Jersey to run the state Department of Motor Vehicles, cracking
down on drunk driving and becoming one of the nation’s most prominent advocates for highway safety.
At five-foot-seven and at least 210 pounds, Hoffman was described by reporters as a “jolly fat man.” His frequent invitations to dinners around New Jersey led to even higher readings on the scales and higher ratings in the polls.
There was no question Hoffman was built for politics, it was in his DNA. The comedian Joe Laurie Jr., a friend of Hoffman’s, once wrote, “At the age of two, he passed a lead quarter to the family doctor. When he was seven, a gang of burglars held him up and he came out with a fine set of burglar tools and two gold watches. It was then his folks knew he was going to be a politician. And when at the age of eight he started learning the 3-Rs, his version was ‘This is Ours, that is Ours, everything is ours.’ Then, his parents were sure he was going to be a Jersey politician.”
Hoffman ran for governor in 1934, and in a year when Democrats swept through his state, he had been successful. He was sworn in days after the Hauptmann trial had begun, and his first official act as governor was to renew the term of Justice Trenchard, which was set to expire in the middle of January. But Hoffman’s popularity waned in 1935 after he pushed through New Jersey’s first sales tax in the middle of the Depression despite opposition from his political party. It didn’t matter that the legislation called for the 2 percent rate to expire in 1938, the political damage had been done.
Hoffman’s outspoken nature may have served him well in campaigns, but when it came to Hauptmann, the public didn’t understand. The governor granted Hauptmann a stay in his execution date, originally set for the week of March 18, 1935, and then delayed further by the state’s highest appellate court, because he believed Hauptmann hadn’t acted alone and shouldn’t be killed until everyone involved was brought to justice.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 29